Book Review: Bad Blood: A Life Without Consequence

TITLE: Bad Blood: A Life Without Consequence

AUTHOR: David B. Roundsley

328 pages, DBR Design, ISBN 9781735377902 (hardcover)

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads) "Bad Blood: A Life without Consequence" chronicles one adoptee's search and journey to discover his birth parents and his roots in the new world of DNA testing, data aggregation, and social media. What began with a simple inquiry to hopefully find his biological roots led one adoptee down a rabbit hole of intrigue, secrets, dark deeds, infidelity, and organized crime.

Tracing his birth parents' origins from Detroit, Michigan, and on to their subsequent movements to Southern California, northward to Montana, and then on to Washington, and later to Oregon, he uncovered secrets and exposed many of the lies they told along the way. The trail of abuse and damage led to a man who lived a life without consequence.

A search begun in the early 90's was abandoned but was revived when he caught a TV show on adoption by chance and submitted the information he had to a "Search Angel". This led to the discovery of his birth parents, several half-siblings, infidelities, organized crime, drug use, abuse, and attempted murder.

Both a how-to and a cautionary tale of navigating the world of complex social media hurdles, sifting through massive quantities of data, and dealing with an often unhelpful and obstructive legal system.

MY RATING: 5 stars out of 5.

MY THOUGHTS: This is an absolutely engrossing memoir about adoption, secrets, and the search to understand where we came from and who we are. I found it extremely hard to put down. That’s partially because of the way the book is structured. The reader only becomes privy to information as Roundsley’s original search uncovered it. There are a few hints at the start of the book of what will ultimately be revealed (most but not all of which is noted in the book’s back cover matter) but for the most part we the audience must endure the same staggers and stutters the author did. Long fallow periods are interspersed surges of new leads some of which go nowhere and some of which open new roads of inquiry. This heightens the immediacy of the book and kept me more interested than maybe a straight chronological history of the author’s birth parents would have.

It doesn’t take long for Roundsley (and the reader) to realize his adoption was an unusual one. Or perhaps not so unusual given the time period as it was something “nice” people just didn’t consider a reality: that behind-closed-doors baby-trafficking happened even among “polite” society. As author learns more about his late birth mother’s life and gets closer to meeting his birth father, the stakes start to feel exceedingly high indeed. There are some very, very dark moments in the birth parents’ past, and some of them are uneasy to read about.

But the story is not all crime, drug use, physical abuse, and attempted murder – Roundsley discovers several half-siblings and meets their families. Their parts in the story are equally, if not more, tragic – but the larger family and obvious love these half-siblings develop for each other are a happy ending to such a dark background. Roundsley sprinkles their stories in with his search, even letting one sister take over for a section to reveal her own almost Dickensian history. I do feel as though I intimately know all of the parties involved thanks to Roundsley’s very personal, intimate, and familiar writing style and the way he’s willing to cede the stage to his siblings when the narrative warrants.

Along the way, the author also reveals a bit about his adoptive family and touches on the struggles of being a creative and obviously gay boy in a family that clearly doesn’t accept it. While the adoptive parents and sibling don’t have nearly the tragic life Roundsley’s birth parents did, they still play several key roles in the way the story unfolds. I have to say I’d love to see a second memoir from Roundsley about his later childhood and eventual coming out; I suspect there’s a lot more to that part of his life than he was able to include in this book. He’s also had quite a career in the music industry: he writes and records music as Munich Syndrome, and there is a companion CD to the book. I know there are a lot of compelling stories he could weave together with his coming out to form a second memoir.

Bad Blood: A Life Without Consequence is available for Pre-Order in Kindle form on Amazon if you missed the Kickstarter for the project.

Review of Arion Golmakani's SOLACERS

TITLE: Solacers: An Iranian Oliver Twist story: a memoir

AUTHOR: Arion Golmakani

331 pages, Bowker, paperback and e-book formats, ISBN 978-0989898157

DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Solacers tells the touching story of a boy's search for family life and safety following the divorce of his parents in Iran during the 1960’s. The first child of a heartless father and a discarded mother is left to fend for himself on the streets of Mashhad, seeking food and shelter wherever he can. His lonely early years are an unbelievable tale of cruelty and betrayal on the part of nearly everyone who might be expected to help, save for one aunt who does her best to keep him from starving. But living a harsh and solitary existence has one advantage for this little boy: other than forcing him to be self-reliant, no one attempts to indoctrinate him on Iranian society's archaic cultural values and religious beliefs. And so, he never accepts his wretched state as fate, choosing instead to dream big dreams about getting an education, having his own family, and starting a new life – possibly in the faraway land called America. He makes a plan and by the age of 17 he boards a plane to the land of possibilities, where his dreams eventually also take flight.

MY RATING: Four out of five stars

MY THOUGHTS: Solacers is not an easy book to read. The author’s storytelling style is breezy and friendly enough, but the subject matter is almost unrelentingly raw. I kept having to set the book down, thinking “how could anyone treat a child this way?” As unfathomable as the behavior of most of the adults in Alireza (Arion) Golmakani’s childhood might be to me, a middle-class American with parents who weren’t perfect but were always present, it is entirely real and too common still. Poverty of the level Golmakani describes isn’t a thing of the third world countries past – it still exists today even in prosperous nations like the United States and Canada. And that’s what makes this very personal memoir so universal and so eye-opening.

It is the 1960s, well before Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Alireza’s childhood is spent mostly homeless in a small northern Iranian city. He and his life are about as far removed from politics as one can get, so we don’t really get an eye towards how Iran was interacting on the world stage at the time – Golmakani leaves that to history books to discuss (except towards the end, when a nearly-adult Alireza joins the military and applies to be sent to study abroad in the United States). Th book otherwise is a very street-level look at family, city and religion and how they intertwine to keep Alireza in the horrible conditions he somehow (with the limited aid of those he calls ‘solacers’) to survive.

The book’s subtitle comparison to Charles Dickens’ classic work is apt, as Alireza is bounced between his estranged parents and a multitude of foster homes and fending for himself on the street. I suspect that had Golmakani totally fictionalized the story, reviewers would have said the tale was almost too Dickensian in terms of the characters. There’s the plucky street rat kid; distant but ultimately loving foster mother and brother (the true ‘solacers’ of the title, although there are points where even they spectacularly fail the boy); the brute of a birth father who physically and emotionally abuses everyone; the heroic stepfather with feet of clay that prohibit him from being the man Alireza needs him to be; the loving grandfather who dies too early; the birth mother whose own abuse at her ex-husband’s and lack of self-worth enable her to abandon her son. Alireza’s relationship with any one of these people would be the stuff of awards-nominated novels and Oscar-bait films, and in real life the boy dealt with, and survived, all of them.

And here’s the remarkable thing: despite how horribly most of these adults let the pre-teen and teen Alireza down, often putting him in dangerous, potentially life-threatening situations time and again, the author chooses to concentrate on the love (as limited and fallible as it was) he was given, the solace he received from sometimes unexpected quarters. He returns time and again to complimenting the foster mother and brother who made sure he got an education even though they often left him alone for the summer months, and the aunt and grandmother who occasionally were able to give him a place to sleep and hand-me-down clothes even when they were too poor to feed him along with their own families. Even his descriptions of his mother’s abandonment, moving with her new husband and children to Tehran, is tempered with a hindsight understanding of why she was the way she was (obsessive-compulsive, guilt-ridden, and beaten down).

Throughout the book, it is clear that the adult Arion Golmakani is grateful for what little scraps of support and affection he was shown. It is telling that he chooses to name the book in honor of those providers of limited solace rather than focusing on those who so drastically failed him. I marvel at his ability to see the positive in the worst situations as much as I marvel at how he managed to survive and rise above.